When deciding to get into content marketing, the most classic mistake is to hire someone without integrating their duties with the overall strategy of the company.

All too often, employees find themselves catapulted into the role of Content Manager without really understanding what their new duties entail.

Inversely, looking elsewhere to find the right balance between strategic and creative talent is not much easier! 

Should we hire marketers and hope they took a modern literature and communications option during their degree? Or should we seek out pure copywriters who don't know much about lead generation but have built an impressive portfolio in journalism ?

To build a cohesive team, it is necessary to bring together at least these four profiles :

Curious and resourceful writers

Don't necessarily go out and poach a marketer to give them a new writing assignment. There are plenty of freelance writers and journalists who are willing to write premium content for brands.

The ideal writer has experience in reporting and case studies and will be able to write high-quality articles with a tight deadline.

Mastering the journalistic basics is essential. A good writer for the web must know how to write for that particular medium, and follow the rules specific to that job, such as the writing technique known as the inverted pyramid. 

Other than these skills, the writer is expected to have a good dose of curiosity, a great ability to tell a story (the famous storytelling), some fluency in the language and good interviewing methods. 

Meticulous and articulate web editors

To put it simply, you could say that the writer writes about his or her favorite topic, and the editor rewrites to tailor the text to the readers.

If this step seems optional to you, you probably need to review your Content Marketing basics, because the web editor is an essential link in the production chain!

Already in 2007, Joel Ronez, in his book "l'écrit web", said the following:

"The first era of the Internet gave the lead to the techies. Then we saw the editors come in. We're still missing the editors"

A brand-dedicated editor knows the target audience inside and out. He knows how to use content to achieve his goals taking into account the constraints and opportunities of the editorial strategy and the needs of the personas, the core target.

He knows exactly what will make readers want to read and what kind of content will get attention. In addition, an editor is strong enough to stand up to marketers, who will try to hijack content creation efforts to transform them into promotional tools to sell products or services.

An editor can be hired in-house or their services can be outsourced.

Engaged and synthetic multimedia experts

Under the guise that it is generally less well referenced than textual content, some Content Managers tend to somewhat neglect rich, multimedia content. The latter is however, if we judge by the study State of Inbound 2016, the content that people like the most!

An expert videographer and multimedia editor can come from a variety of backgrounds. He or she may be selected on a freelance basis for one-time projects.

Beyond his or her skills as a computer graphics designer, the multimedia expert must be able to transform the ideas and concepts emanating from the content produced upstream to synthesize it in the form of an infographic or short video. 

Diplomatic and modest strategists

The adjectives "modest" or "humble" are generally not the ones one expects to be attached to the position of strategy expert! Yet, it is indeed a fundamental quality because it allows one to avoid too obvious shortcuts in the implementation of a Content Marketing approach of the type "Oh, that's pretty simple, I've already worked on this content strategy, let's just do it again!" - without taking into account the specificities of personas!

The content strategy expert must be a fine diplomat and have very good interpersonal skills to manage the often contradictory requests that come from marketing or communication departments.

His role is to be able to communicate with all departments first and foremost. If a strategist is too content creation oriented, he won't be able to discuss with the people in charge of the budget for example. He also needs to be able to understand the impact that content can have and how to measure and optimize its impact in an editorial calendar.

A strategist should be able to do a benchmark and establish an audit on a brand's entire ecosystem using seo tools.

What about you? Is there another type of profile you'd like to see on a dedicated content team? What are the rules you apply in your creation?